


Artifact

by Sylaise



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, F/M, I promise there will be a little bit of funny in this one, Memories, Narrative, POV First Person, Shepard talks to herself, Storytelling, biography, small moments
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-06
Updated: 2016-09-06
Packaged: 2018-08-13 09:21:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7971583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sylaise/pseuds/Sylaise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"By the time the end was drawing in around her, and perhaps even a long time before, I’m certain this was no longer meant as simply an account of her journey, but a kind of catharsis, a way to put the nameless fears to rest, to remember the small joys and not infrequent moments of laughter, to unravel the knots of her despair."<br/>-Dr. L. Tsoni<br/>----------<br/>Liara gives Mariah Shepard a means to tell her story for the time capsule in her own words and the Commander is surprised to find venting to some distant civilization 50,000 years later very helpful as she stands between the Reapers the rest of the galaxy. Long form fic that follows the events of ME2 and 3 with lots of references to ME1. Some further explorations of in-game events but mostly the quieter, unseen moments of Shepard and her crew.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Preamble

**Author's Note:**

> I posted something like this a year or so ago and wasn't very happy with how it turned out, so I eventually ended up deleting it. But revisiting the concept, I realized how much I liked it, and how much I wanted to try to make it work. So I'm diving back into it, after having finished "The Last Time" and wanting just to write more of my Mariah Shepard and her relationships with her crew. First person is a new challenge for me, and I'm a bit nervous posting it, but delving back into these characters has been so much fun and such a good escape from a bit of a hard time. Thanks for taking the time to check this out, and I hope you enjoy :)

_Here follows the record of Commander Mariah Shepard, Alliance Navy, Special Tactics and Reconnaissance, Hero of the Skillian Blitz, the Battle of the Citadel and the Reaper War._

A short preamble.

Mariah Shepard, the most courageous soldier the Alliance military (see _History of the Human Alliance_ ) has ever seen, was born on a space station far from Earth. Daughter of Hannah and Elias Shepard, themselves decorated naval officers, Shepard was raised traveling from station to station, her parents often bringing her along on deployments for months at a time. Though she often spoke fondly of both of them, especially her father, who was killed during a shadow op in the Terminus systems when she was sixteen, it is difficult to imagine such a childhood.

I believe it made her the type of person who could choose between saving three-thousand alliance soldiers or an Asari dreadnought with a crew of ten thousand on board, plus the members of the Citadel council (see _Government, 2.10_ ).  She made difficult choices. I didn’t always agree with her when she made them, but in the aftermath, in the conversations that followed, I saw the weight of those choices. Occasionally, I feared it would crush her.

I don’t think any of the people who knew her could speak to the depth of her loneliness, including myself. However, I’ve never known an individual to inspire so many with such hope and courage. When I approached her about this project, she told me to write down the facts, to leave a record of her mark on the history of the galaxy that would allow future civilizations to judge her based on her actions alone.

As a historian, I agree that it would be wrong for me to try to persuade you, the finder of this artifact, of her virtue--and make no mistake, my admiration for Shepard would paint a picture of unrivaled heroism--but as a historian, I also sometimes long for a key to the distant past that would tell, not of great battles or political movements, but of the individuals behind them.

The following voice record is from Shepard herself, and it is after a great amount of deliberation that I enclose it.

On a whim, I gave her a voice recorder after I spoke with her about her file in this project, telling her that if she thought of anything she wanted to share with a civilization in a time unknown, she should record it. Upon her death, when I discovered the file uploaded to my omnitool (see _Technology, 1.13_ ) I was expecting to find a single message, perhaps a goodbye to myself or to another she cared for.

However, what I found is a most extraordinary piece of history.

By the time the end was drawing in around her, and perhaps even a long time before, I’m certain this was no longer meant as simply an account of her journey, but a kind of catharsis, a way to put the nameless fears to rest, to remember the small joys and not infrequent moments of laughter, to unravel the knots of her despair.

I’ve kept you too long, and fear I’ve already failed my dear friend in her request to let her actions speak for themselves, and neglected my duty as an impartial courier of the past. But rarely does the folly of mortality lend itself to such neat packaging, and never did I claim to be a very good historian in the first place.

-Dr. L. Tsoni, Earth date December 24, 2186

 


	2. The Time Before

If you’re looking for some grand story of sacrifice and heroism, this probably isn’t it. Well, I guess maybe I've sacrificed a few things. A few bits of myself here and there. But heroism? I don’t know. 

Shit, I don’t even know if any of this isn’t going to sound like complete nonsense to some scientist or soldier or smuggler or whoever finds this in 50,000 years. At the very least it'll be a bit of entertainment on your way back to wherever you came from. Maybe by the time you get to this you will have evolved to the point where all the emotional crap won’t be an issue, and you all are able to compartmentalize your feelings so that they only affect you when you allow them to.

Maybe you don’t even know about the things we call ‘love’ and ‘hate’ and ‘honor’ and ‘fear.’ 

Come to think of it, we can’t really make sense of them either. We just know that sometimes they can hook into us and pull us apart from the inside out. And leave us in bloody chunks.

I’m not going to be very good at this. Liara, if I’m dead and you’re listening to this, I know what you’re doing. You gave me this thing so I could talk to myself without feeling like I’m going nuts. 

I never used to talk to myself. Not before Cerberus. 

In my head, I guess I did. Just like anyone else. And on missions when things start falling apart around you do find yourself talking your way out of adrenaline-infused panic with a few _keep it together’s_ and _deeeeep breaths, just take deeeep breaths_. But I’ve never been one to just...talk...when I’m sitting alone. I guess it’s easier to piece little bits of your mind together after dying and being brought back to life when you put things into words. 

I’m getting ahead of myself I guess. 

I will say that my memories didn’t start being so vivid until after I came back. I don’t know if that’s by design, if they put something in my brain to make my memory more effective, or if the things that have happened since my reincarnation have just been more memorable. Maybe a little bit of both. 

They aren’t perfect. Not anything like Thane’s perfect recall. 

And of course, there are times before that day, before the first Normandy was attacked that I remember in almost as much detail. That's the same as any person who's lived through a war, though. Or...well, I guess everyone has a time before and a time after. A time before death, before loss, before grief, and the time after; when the sharp edges of those things dull a little bit and you get on with your life. But in that time after, you aren't ever exactly the same as you were before.

You remember those days. You remember what you ate for breakfast, who you were with, what you were doing. 

Of course I remember the Normandy on the day the Collectors attacked it. It was playing on repeat every time I shut my eyes for a good month after I woke up two years later, my brain clearly trying to siphon everything it could out of the last memory I had of my friends, my crew, my life, before the rest of the world skipped ahead two years.

That was my time before. 

I remember showering that morning.

I was standing so that the hot water hit the back of my neck and ran down between my breasts, leaving rosy-red trails down my chest and stomach where it poured off the ends of my hair.  

I wasn’t quite ready to be the Commander of anything. Not just yet. I was still lost in that delicious state of liquid exhaustion you feel after a night of sex with someone you’ve just gotten used to. It’s not like you feel after the morning you’re with someone new. There aren’t butterflies in your stomach or anything. It’s just a warm kind of comfort, and you’re satisfied because the other person knows your body and you know they’re satisfied because you know theirs. And you can remember the things that worked and the things that didn’t for the next time, because you know there will be a next time.

It had been a long time since I’d had anything like that with someone.

Eventually, the hot water ran out and I climbed back into the bed where Kaidan was still sleeping. It’s strange that I still remember the smell of the sheets as I burrowed down into the covers, letting the cotton wick the last of the water from my legs. They smelled like sex and sweat and the musk of Sandalwood (which he must've paid a fortune for) and my shampoo. Almond. 

He stirred awake and he slowly moved over me, licking the water droplets off my neck and whispering semi-nonsensical things, mostly about the night before. We rendered my shower pointless by moving into each other slowly, slowly, on our sides, and when he came inside me he held his hips still against mine so I could feel every spurt and every quiver. I remember biting his shoulder as I came apart around him and thinking, in that moment as I felt the press of his nimble fingers on me, relishing the wet heat dripping down between my legs, that _this_ is what it was to share a bed with someone. 

We showered together, afterward, but it was...practical. We talked as we shampooed each other’s hair, about nothing, really. The day ahead of us, shipmates, the news coming in from around the galaxy.

It’s funny how you remember those things. And I can’t believe I just said some of them out loud, but it’s important, I guess, because of how much has changed since then. Well, it’s important to me. Maybe not to the fate of the galaxy.

We rode the elevator separately--me going first--mostly out of habit. I was pretty certain the walls and floors of the Normandy were sound-proof to human ears, but who knew about Turian or Asari. Or Krogan, come to that. There had been enough smirking in the mess to make me think their hearing was more than a little bit better than ours.

The work on the ship that day was business as usual for a relay-jump, mostly prep-work, reading data pads full of mind-numbing information. Lately, it had been file after file of data about Geth. Their movements. Their numbers. Their resources.

We were on our way to to a small stronghold on some rock of a planet whose name I can’t remember. Our ninth jump on that deployment. 

Looking back now, I can see what the Council was doing; putting us as far out of the public eye of the galaxy as possible, hoping our memories of Sovereign and our warnings about the Reapers would get lost out there in the Far Rim. But we were all still so full of Saren and Virmire, and wave after wave of Geth rushing at us on the Citadel that none of us really questioned the monotony. I think we were grateful to sit down to meals together, put our armor on, wipe out the strongholds and come back to the ship and drink.

It was a very shallow breath of peace before the storm we all knew was coming, and I don’t think any one of us wanted to interrupt it. 


	3. Heat

The heat. I don’t know if I can put a word to it.

 _Cooking_ is the thing that comes to mind.

After the initial impact knocked me off my feet, and I blinked away the stars swimming in front of my eyes from the corner of a nav screen hitting the side of my head as I fell, I was instantly completely aware of the overpowering, crushing heat pouring from the walls of the metal box carrying us through the void of space.

 _Up. Get up,_  I screamed at myself.

Still unsteady and ignoring the warm trickle snaking its way down the side of my face, and the exquisite pain lacing through the nerves in my temple, I scrambled up and tried to take a breath. My lungs filled with twin clouds of poison, the fumes of burning metals and glass and plastic.

Coughing, I stumbled up the stairs to where a few emergency hardsuits were stowed. I have to admit, when I got to them, it was hard to walk away. But I had my own suit in my cabin, and I wasn’t going to let one of my crew suffocate because I couldn’t walk up a few more steps to get it.

I clawed my way up, on my hands and knees, but I could already feel the artificial gravity starting to falter, and instead of rising, the smoke just hung, and it was getting tough to keep my knees on the grated steps. My dented head felt lighter and easier to hold up. Give and take, I guess.

“Shepard!’

Garrus. I’m saying it now and I’ll probably say it a thousand times more before this is over. Thank God for Garrus.

He was making his way up the staircase, holding the metal railing with both talons to keep himself grounded. I remember the halos my (likely) concussed brain formed around the blazing light that glanced off his body armor as he ran ahead of me, wrenching open the door to my cabin and coming out a moment later with my helmet and mask. He threw them at me, and I jammed the mask over my mouth and nose and drank in the clean oxygen like a thirsty dog.

As I pulled my foot through the left leg of the suit, with Garrus plugging the stabilizer into my helmet, I felt...well...it’s tough to describe how it felt.

The gravity in the corridor outside my cabin had stabilized, and it was like the opposite feeling of getting a weighted vest lifted off.  My arms and head felt heavier, and lifting my other foot to get it into the suit was an awful lot of work.

“Tali must’ve repaired whatever mass effect field controls the artificial gravity,” Garrus said, stepping back and letting me get my bearings in my suit.

I froze, still fumbling with with the transmitter switch on my shoulder. I grabbed his arm, yanking him back down a few steps and roared, “You tell her to get her ass out of engineering and onto an evac shuttle...and if she tries to fight you, you pick her up and you carry her. Tell Pressley to contact Hackett and see who's close enough to come get us. 

“Right,” said Garrus, already running past me.

“And get Adams out of there too!” I shouted after him.

I ran back down the steps and started pulling out pieces of armor and throwing them down the stairs, five in all, and grabbed the masks and ran to where I knew the analysts had been eating in the mess. They were new recruits, and I figured if anyone would need help, they would. I passed Wrex, a (presumably alive) human body slung over each of his shoulders, wading through the rubble to get to a pod.

 _Kaidan. Where was Kaidan_?

Part of me wanted to drop everything and search for him. I shouted into my transmitter but got back only static.

There really is a reason you don’t get involved with crew members, especially when you’re in charge of a ship. It makes you want to do stupid things. I’m happy to say I resisted every impulse I had to say fuck everything else and just go looking for him in the pressure cooker my beautiful ship had become. As I helped the analysts with their masks, I barked at them to run and get into a shuttle, don’t stop, don’t look back and don’t try to be heroes.

 _Kaidan Kaidan Kaidan_ , my every conscious thought shrieked at me, but I moved toward the docking bay and shuttles, dutifully and methodically looking for survivors amid the detritus of broken data pads and overturned chairs on the floor. I talked to him then. Talked to him like he was next to me as I sprinted down the steps to the shuttle bay.

_Don’t you...don’t you dare be dead or trying to save someone. Don’t you dare do this to me._

A dark haired man a few feet in front of me, clearly crushed under a twisted ceiling panel, blood pooling out around him... _No, god damn you, no....._

 _Not you. Don’t you fucking do that to me again_.

To this day, I can’t remember who the soldier in that staircase was. The whole ‘him not being Kaidan’ aspect has completely driven any recognition I might have had in the moment out of my head.

Christ, I need a drink.

Not one of my finer moments, I guess. It’s one of those things that still has its little barbs in me. 

I guess I don’t have to say that he didn’t die that day. I’m sure Liara has put something somewhere in her artifact about him.

It’s funny. When you’re a soldier, you accept your death, the deaths of your friends, whatever lovers you have, and, in my case, even the deaths of your parents. You run the images of them being gunned down by enemy troops through your head every once in awhile just to be sure you remember what could happen.

They tell you to do that. In basic training. In the N-7 program, even. I guess they figure it will help you keep people at arms' length, so you don’t...forget where you are and what you are.

I always figure any person who isn’t a machine will call bullshit on that. All it does is make you fight harder to keep them alive, because the closer you get--and you will get closer--the harder those images become to accept. And you start doing stupid things to prevent them from happening.

When it came down to it, seeing Kaidan dropped by enemy fire in the middle of a battle would have been horrific. 

But then. _There_. On the most routine of routine days. While he was probably having a third cup of coffee as he chatted with Doctor Chakwas. Or absently flipping through a report, thinking about something he had to tell his father. Or really anything he would have been doing when the Collectors came for us.

It just... It wouldn’t have been easy to come back from.

Ironically, he was the one who came for me as I was trying to ignore one of the stronger urges to drop the large handful of lives I held as I tried to activate the last three escape shuttles to go back for him. My adrenaline was running too high for anything like "thank god you're okay" or even "are you okay?" I could tell by the new scratches on his armor that he had been weeding through debris to get people to safety.

"Do you think the Alliance will get here in time?" he asked as he picked up an extinguisher to clear the way for the last of the crew members.

Grabbing a second extinguisher, I said "They sure as hell better." 

"Joker's still in the cockpit. He won't abandon ship. I'm not leaving either." 

_Shit._

I grabbed his shoulder, and I remember wondering if the bitemarks I'd made there this morning still dotted his skin underneath the ceramic plates. 

The things you think of. 

"Kaidan..."

His head cocked to one side, and I wondered what his face looked like underneath his mask. He seemed to be daring me to try to order him to leave. 

"I need you to make sure everyone gets onto the last escape shuttle. I'll go back for Joker." 

He started to raise the hand not gripping the extinguisher. 

"That's an  _order,_ Lieutenant," I yelled as I started to run back up the stairs to the lower deck.

What does it say about me that it didn't occur to me that he probably had the same clawing, biting cage match going on inside him; the impulse to wait for me versus doing his duty as an officer. That seeing me run back onto a burning ship to save someone else was eating away at him where he stood. Now that I knew where he was and that he was within spitting distance of a way off the ship, I could go back to being a big damn hero. 

Yep. That’s me. A big goddamn hero. 

My ship crumbled around me, as I felt the sweat pouring off of my skin underneath my suit and armor. In my haste to put it on, I'd clearly missed the connection for the cooling mechanism. Glancing back one last time as I sprinted around the corner, up the stairs toward the cockpit, I saw Tali pulling Kaidan by the hand onto the last pod. Good. We could fight about it later. 

 

 


End file.
